{"id":461,"date":"2007-12-01T11:32:40","date_gmt":"2007-12-01T10:32:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/ijwp\/mt.php\/2007\/12\/01\/today_programme_embarrassment"},"modified":"2025-10-10T10:20:35","modified_gmt":"2025-10-10T09:20:35","slug":"today_programme_embarrassment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/mt.php\/2007\/12\/01\/today_programme_embarrassment","title":{"rendered":"Today programme embarrassment"},"content":{"rendered":"

Technorati Tags: gillian gibbons<\/a><\/p>\n

Last Thursday morning, Ed Husain and Massoud Shadjareh (of the Islamic Human Rights Commission<\/a>) appeared on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 – you can download it until next Wednesday here<\/a> (Real). It is obviously disappointing to hear them invite Ed Husain because of his total lack of authority other than having recently had a book published. The performance of Massoud Shadjareh, when pushed by the interviewer John Humphries, also left a lot to be desired. (More: Ummah Pulse<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Massoud Shadjareh pointed out that many people name their children Muhammad, which he said did not mean they intended that their children would be prophets, that there was no indication that any insult was intended, and that he was surprised that it had gone this far. He alleged that there "has been an attempt in the West to associate this with Islam, and there seems to be becoming more of an item because it sort of confirms what we love to hate". Humphries then said,<\/p>\n

"There are reasons for that, aren't there? For instance, you may regard this particular case as absurd, but if you ask people in your position, and I'll put the same question to you, whether you condemn unreservedly the stoning of women accused of adultery, what do you say to that? There are many of your colleagues, perhaps you, who would refuse to condemn that barbarous practice."<\/p>\n

Shadjareh replied:<\/p>\n

"The fact of the matter is, I mean, I would not condemn the concept of Shari'ah but I do condemn the implementation of barbaric-ism under the pretence of Shariah …"<\/p>\n

Humphries: "And would you include the stoning of adulterers in that? In other words, do you condemn unreservedly the stoning of adulterers?"<\/p>\n

Shadjareh: "To my, to my own knowledge I have have failed to see anyone was stoned at the time of the Prophet, peace be upon him, in that way, so you know I actually go along with that."<\/p>\n

Humphries: "You go along with …"<\/p>\n

Shadjareh: "With the fact that, you know, it wasn't, there was no stoning done at the time of the –"<\/p>\n

Humphries: "So in other words, it should be condemned unreservedly in your view?"<\/p>\n

Shadjareh: "Yup."<\/p>\n

Humphries: "Yup."<\/p>\n

He then brought in Ed Husain, who corrected him by saying that there were indeed stonings done during the life of the Prophet, sall' Allahu 'alaihi wa sallam, who noted that there was "a degree of hesitancy there, in outright condemnation of stoning in our world today", even though Humphries "defended" Shadjareh by pointing out that he did, in fact, condemn it. Shadjareh brought up the usual issue of whether a Christian should be expected to condemn the parts of the Bible which say that homosexuality is an abomination, but Ed, when he was brought back in, claimed that the stonings which happened at the time of the Prophet, sall' Allahu 'alaihi wa sallam, happened in a particular historical context which was no longer relevant, "and therefore Muslims should go far as to say that other modes of reaching the noble aims of the Shari'ah, in other words protection of life, property, reason, religion and so on, if we can attain those aims by other means, i.e. imprisonment and so on, then why we do we need to go down that barbaric, inhumane and outdated mode of stoning and flogging people".<\/p>\n

Two things stand out here. First, imprisonment is not a greatly more humane mode of punishing someone than flogging them, because a flogging is over pretty quickly while imprisonment lasts months, during which one may well be at the mercy of much more serious criminals and malevolent guards; depending on where the imprisonment happens, you may also be exposed to life-threatening diseases, through general conditions or food unfit for consumption, and denied medical care. Ed Husain, despite posing as a moderate, orthodox Muslim, is clearly nothing of the sort.<\/p>\n

Second, Massoud Shadjareh allowed himself to be sidetracked by Humphries onto a discussion of a completely different aspect of Islam. The topic at hand was not adultery but the case of one woman, accused wrongly of a crime against Islam. I think the IHRC should put up somebody who speaks English better than Mr Shadjareh and better able to handle an aggressive, opinionated interviewer next time an Islamic spokesperson is required in an emotive situation like this one, so that he would not be intimidated into making a false and apologetic statement about Islam, because if you do that, you may well be exposed; in this case, it happened within the minute.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Technorati Tags: gillian gibbons Last Thursday morning, Ed Husain and Massoud Shadjareh (of the Islamic Human Rights Commission) appeared on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 – you can download it until next...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-461","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-ed_husain_shiraz_maher"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p17bgV-7r","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/461","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=461"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/461\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41930,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/461\/revisions\/41930"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=461"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=461"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=461"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}